Dwellers in the House of the Lord. Wesley McNair
marry her. Nobody would have guessed
he would come back later to do it,
or that he would take her to live with him
north of a Navy base in rural Virginia,
his smiling, clean-shaven face now
overgrown by an unkempt, anti-social beard.
Outside the back window
of Aimee’s second house
from the time they moved in,
the high, dangling chains
and gambrel stick
of a deer-slaughtering station.
In the front, open all day,
Mike’s gun shop. “Obama
is going to make me rich,”
he says one night, chuckling
on the phone before handing it
to Aimee, “but I’m already
out of bullets. Everybody
down here’s out of bullets.”
Behind his chain-link fence, two dogs,
penned for life without names
so they won’t be spoiled for hunting.
3 •
One fall day in Claremont, New Hampshire,
my stepfather, who came with his family
from Quebec, Canada, took me and my brothers
to visit a Polish family in a triple-decker
apartment without enough windows to throw
off the gloom. The father produced two glasses
for drink, and at the edges of his storytelling
and gesticulation, Mike, a quiet boy my older
brother’s age, emerged beside his mother,
who dragged one leg, because of a stroke
she suffered as a young woman, I later learned,
and still later, from Mike, that she never
touched him except with a switch,
yelling at him in Polish for breaking her rules,
and each week made him bring her, as if
it were his fault, the half-empty bottles of vodka
his father had hidden in the hall closet, or behind
the toilet, or under the front seat of the car.
It took only ten years for the new K-Mart Lawn
and Garden Center at the mall off route 89 to destroy
the nursery business my stepfather and my mother
had built. Afterward he lost the anger he learned
from growing up as an immigrant, and the defensive
tilt of his chin that said I’m better than you
and I’m no good at the same time. Opening himself
at last to the defeat he feared from the start,
he went back to his job on the night shift
at the same shop where his father worked
until he died. No one could reach him. Even when
my mother, grown desperate, blamed him for quitting,
he was silent, wearing the dazed look of a man
who’d awakened in the dreamlife of a stranger.
“Listen to her brag about getting food stamps,”
Mike shouts to Aimee, who’s in the kitchen
while he watches a black woman
with two children in Virginia Beach on TV.
“She can’t even talk right,” he says.
In the presidential campaign of 2016,
two stories: on one side, the uplifting
American Story of the Immigrant,
on the other, a darker story
derived from the failures of the first,
both of them our stories.
4 •
For years the two of them drifted
toward each other, Mike dulled
by alcohol on submarines, Aimee
looking for a home. At age 21,
she ended up in a bathtub
in the projects of Claremont
with a French-Canadian husband
who stooped over her, starting up
a hair dryer and threatening
to toss it into the water with her.
Meanwhile, at 35, Mike spent
an entire leave and all his money
on a bar stool in Naples, Italy,
barely recalling his wife and stepchildren
back in the States. Closer now
in their drift, Mike, retired from the Navy,
wakes up in Abner, Virginia, as a Jehovah’s
Witness with half his life gone to drink,
saved by Alcoholics Anonymous
and an angry God devoted to fire
and retribution. Divorced, like him,
Aimee is back home with her father,
who named her, now an old man gone silent,
and her pitiless, faultfinding mother,
more convinced than ever that the only
life left for her is her reconstructed
daughter’s life. Driving to another town,
Aimee walks up four stairways of a tall
building and jumps off the roof, breaking
her ankle, her leg, and two vertebrae.
Waking in the trash of an alley, she feels
the excruciating pain of her body,
which is also the pain of still being alive.
This is the moment my fragile sister thinks of,
lying in the dark for hours under her bed
after returning to Mike from her mother’s house,
with no place else on earth to hide.
5 •
But before that lying in the dark,
she must lie in the zero
of a white room at the hospital,
bandaged and lost to herself.
And when at last she opens
her eyes, she finds Mike sitting